My CCNA Journey
Hey y’all,
I passed the CCNA and wanted to share my experience. Background: I’ve had 1+ year working in IT Help Desk and I was trying to get my CCNA to make myself competitive for sys admin positions.
I had taken and passed Network+ about 2 months ago so the material was still fresh on my mind. You can jump straight into CCNA but if you have no networking experience, I highly suggest you at least go through the Network+ material as there’s a good amount of overlap. If you can get through Network+ (just the material- you don’t have to take the test) I would say you have at least 50% of the theoretical stuff down. My recommendation is Professor Messer’s YouTube playlist for Network+ review.
Phase 1: This first phase was to lay the foundations and try to learn as much as I can. If I didn’t understand something, that’s okay because Phase 2 will fill in the gaps. It’s important to at least get the basic theoretical concepts down in this phase. This phase took me about 3 weeks.
Jeremy’s IT Lab YouTube Playlist: Watched the videos at 1.5 speed. Very well done.
Acing the CCNA Exam Vol 1 & 2: Skimmed through both books but they are well written so I don’t regret buying them.
Practical Networking- Subnetting Mastery YouTube Playlist: I thought Jeremy’s videos did a good job of explaining it but if you still don’t understand subnetting, watch through this playlist.
Phase 2: This is where the actual studying begins. And the way I study for exams is through sheer repetition until I just get it. This phase took me 1.5 months but could definitely be shorter. It ends when you feel ready to take the exam.
Jeremy’s IT Lab Anki Flashcards: My bread and butter. I went through at least one set of flashcards every day and would go through each of the flash card sets at least 3+ times. Doing this solidified my theoretical knowledge.
Jeremy’s IT Lab Practice Labs: There are about 40+ labs from the YouTube playlist that you can do and I did each of them 3-5 times (the mega lab- I did 2 times). By the time I took the exam, I could knock out a lab in 3-10 minutes. Doing this method solidified my CLI experience as the commands just came to me by muscle memory.
Jeremy’s IT Lab Practice Exams: There are two of them you can buy but I honestly don’t recommend it as his practice exams are harder than Boson and exceptionally harder than the actual CCNA. Not a waste of money if you buy them as it’s still good practice but you don’t need this. I only went through the exams once.
Boson Ex-Sim: By far the best CCNA practice tests because the multiple choice explanations are very well written. Definitely worth the money and I recommend it to all test takers. I went through each Boson exam three times. It’s harder than the actual CCNA exam so if you can score at least 70%, I think you should be fine. I’ve read about people scoring in the 50s and 60s on Boson that still pass so don’t get alarmed if you don’t do well.
Phase 3: The review phase. Took me one week. Basically I just gathered other people study notes/cheat sheets and reviewed them.
Subnetting Cheat Sheet: https://ibb.co/cYj62tn
CLI Cheat Sheet: https://www.reddit.com/r/ccna/s/tWpXKMdJUZ
CCNA Cheat Sheet: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/computer-networks/ccna-cheatsheet/